The Comma Splice: How to Spot It and Cure It

There’s a nasty little punctuation habit that instantly gives your age away. It’s called the comma splice, and I’ve noticed it’s mostly used by writers under the age of 35.

I don’t blame them for not being able to punctuate properly. After all, it’s not their fault they were unfortunate enough to go to school after it was decided grammar was surplus to the requirements of a rounded education.

But, of all the punctuation crimes out there, it’s the comma splice that upsets me the most.

I’ll explain why in a minute, but first, for all you youngsters out there, what is a comma splice?

Simple: it’s when a comma is used to connect two independent clauses, an independent clause being a group of words that can stand by itself as a separate sentence.

Here are two examples I came across in a magazine recently:

Summer in Rome is always great fun, here are our suggestions for you to make the most of it.

Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio, although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, this hidden treasure is well worth a visit.

I only became aware of the comma splice’s existence about four or five years ago, but I have to tell you that it was a real loss of innocence for me to discover that people would actually think of writing like this.

Worse, I’ve noticed that non-sentences like the above have become pandemic in recent years. They’ve even started appearing on huge advertising billboards – a sign, perhaps, that even professional copywriters are using the comma splice.

There are a number of ways to correct the offending sentences quoted above. You could separate the independent clauses with a more forceful full stop.

Summer in Rome is always great fun. Here are our suggestions for you to make the most of it.

Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio. Although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, this hidden treasure is well worth a visit.

Or, in the first example, you could introduce a conjunction such as “so”:

Summer in Rome is always great fun, so here are our suggestions for you to make the most of it.

In the second example, a little rewrite introducing the relative pronoun “which” fixes the problem:

Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio, which although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, is a hidden treasure that’s well worth a visit.

If you’re still uncertain about what constitutes a comma splice – and how to fix one, do check out this useful exercise, which appears on the Bristol University website (presumably because students at even our better universities have poor grammar these days).

Why I hate the comma splice

What’s distressing about the prevalence of the comma splice is that it creates stream-of-consciousness babble in which unconnected thoughts run hyperactively into each other.

Furthermore, the comma splice betrays in its user a complete ignorance of how the English language works.

To avail yourself of the comma splice, you must have no grasp of what a sentence is. Which means you have no grasp of what a verb is. Or the subject of the sentence. Or the difference between dependent clauses and independent clauses. Or how to connect ideas with conjunctions. Or how to temper the flow of your copy with elegant introductory participial phrases.

(Yes, I’m aware that I’m punctuating clauses here as if they were full sentences. It’s done consciously to achieve a punchier style. Breaking the rules is fine if you understand them – and know why you’re breaking them.)

In short, use the comma splice and you’re telling me that you’re inarticulate, incapable of expressing ideas in a coherent way, and that you have no ear for the rhythms of the English language.

It surprises me, then, that such relatively minor infractions as apostrophe crimes, eccentric hyphenation and use of scare quotes elicit mouth-foaming fulmination among grammar geeks. Some of them even have whole blogs devoted to them.

Yet the far-more-troubling comma splice remains, as far as I’m aware, a relatively unremarked upon offence.

One might compare the difference in gravity to mistakes in music. An apostrophe crime, say, is the equivalent of a wrong note – a technical glitch that may elicit sniggers from your audience but won’t necessarily impair the piece as a whole.

A comma splice, however, is on a par with eccentric phrasing and being consistently one bar ahead of the rest of the band: your poor ear and general lack of musicianship will make your audience wince in pain.

20 comments so far . . . come and pitch in!

Maybe ‘stream-of-consciousness’ is the cause as well as the effect generated. People seem to think less about what they write with shorthand, instantaneous communication encouraging ‘press send’ before thought. Add that to early education efforts focused on output over form and we start to see a perfect storm where words just spew onto the page. And with that I go back to my own notebook to look for my own missteps.

two questions…is is surplus or superfluous that you meant? and when using the dashing dash, isn’t it two hyphens joined? that being posed, i’ve noticed all ages and all nationalities using comma splices. and apparently no one knows how to use a ;. oh well…prescriptive vs. descriptive.

I believe the correct expression is, indeed, “surplus to requirements”. “Superfluous to requirements” does occur, but it would be more correct and elegant to simply say “superfluous” rather than “superfluous to requirements”.

I believe that two hyphens joined for the dashing dash, like the two-spaces-after-a-full-stop rule, goes back to the days of the manual typewriter. These days, one can insert an em dash (as it is called) by holding down the alt key when typing a hyphen. It works in Word, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to translate into WordPress, which is possibly why my em dashes have become hyphens – apologies for any distress caused!

Don’t get me started on the semicolon – I long gave up trying to explain that one to people! I do think it’s best kept for academic writing anyway.

@Susi @Clare
To use an em dash in WordPress (or any other XHTML site) you have to use what’s known as its ‘character entity reference’ which, in this case, is &mdash;.
Here’s a handy list of all the entities available http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

I did find the semi-colon useful in linking clauses when writing academic papers. However I’m finding I use it to a greater extent in writing fiction. It’s really handy if you want to move seamlessly from third person narrated description to interior monologue/thought and resolves some issues of “stream-of-consciousness babble in which unconnected thoughts run hyperactively into each other”. In other words can give direction to thinking/narration.

“He went into the kitchen; the house was freezing and a bowl of soup would warm him up.”

I recognize that comma splices generally reflect a failure of grammatical education, at least at this moment in time. But isn’t it also possible that language is changing with respect to the use of the comma splice? Perhaps a hundred years from now it will be regarded as a perfectly acceptable alternative to what we now consider to be the only legitimate methods for connecting independent clauses.

Hi, I have no argument about using the comma splice in professional or academic writing.
I use it in fiction and I would say, because I feel it moves the action along more smoothly and faster.
I could be wrong. I can see you know the rules. Rules are usually important to follow. But history is full of examples of when we change or get rid of rules that no longer serve their purpose. You did provide a reason for the rule but in my opinion you failed to give a rational purpose that couldn’t be accomplished without the rule. For example, how is the reader misled, confused, by simply not including a conjunction. Does a story or a scene suffer because of a comma splice. The world is full of conjunctionless events that we all manage through.
The last thing i would want to do would be to burden my reader. In fact the very purpose of not including the conjunction is to provide a smooth slide to quickly developing thoughts. If i could even see a glimmer of cause and effect associated with a comma splice, I would err on the side of including it.
enjoyable to have found this site.
tony chan

John there’s a similar problem with pairs of commas and sub clauses in the sentence: ‘Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio, which although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, is a hidden treasure that’s well worth a visit.’

The sub clause is ‘although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere’. The ‘which’ refers to ‘is a hidden treasure that’s well worth a visit’, not the previous one.

So it should read: ‘Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio which, although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, is a hidden treasure that’s well worth a visit.’

The test is to remove the clause split out by pairs of commas and read it back. If it makes no sense, one or more of the commas are in the wrong place.

(Actually, I think if you were to remove ‘for all you youngsters out there’, it would still make sense. You could be on something of a sticky wicket there.)

Jason, the problem you mentioned is just as prevalent as the comma splice. I see it all the time – the comma is always on the wrong side of the “which” or the “but”. And you are correct; the test is to remove the clause between the commas and see if the remaining sentence still reads correctly.

Although I am (a little) younger than John le Carré, I had never heard of this ‘nasty little punctuation habit’ of the comma splice. After doing the Bristol University exercise I realised that in fact I did know what it was, so this article was an elegant reminder.
Your paragraph about the ‘stream-of-consciousness babble’ and ‘unconnected thoughts running hyperactively into each other’ resonated with me. Maybe it’s the hyperactive finger poised above “post or enter” that’s responsible; the disregard of grammar and lack of editing on social media pages often means they are incomprehensible.
Please could you tell me when it is (more) correct to use a semicolon rather than a full stop.